Understanding farmhouse ale

Somehow, the idea that farmhouse ale is a style of beer that began
in
"France
and Belgium in the late 19th and early 20th centuries" has gotten
traction. Many people have begun thinking of farmhouse ale as either
saison or biere de garde. Which is strange, because this is bit like
saying cheese is Danablu, and it began on a Friday afternoon in
Denmark in 1953. So I guess the time has come for some clearing up.

Once farming began in northern Europe there was grain, and very
likely, as soon as there was grain there was also beer.
Archaeological finds indicate that initially,
alcoholic drinks were probably a "grog" of berries/fruit, honey, and
grain. At some point, the timing of which is not yet clear to me,
the technologies for malting and mashing were developed, and there was
beer as we know it today. Unhopped, but recognizably beer, made from
malted grain as the sugar source.

Now, at this point, which at a guess would lie some time in the
last millennium BCE (or possibly earlier, I'm still researching this)
all beer was farmhouse ale in the sense that it was brewed on farms,
for consumption on the farm. The area we are talking about now would
be roughly from Brittany to the lower Volga, from the Alps to the
Arctic Circle. Essentially, Europe north of the wine growing area, and
south of the northern limit for grain growing.

The next step would be the formation of towns and cities. People
living in urban areas have less space, and they cannot grow the
ingredients they need for beer. But they would still need beer. So a
specialization of work arose, whereby some people would brew more beer
than they themselves needed, and sell it to those who did not brew.
These would be the people later known in English as alewives,
brewsters, and brewers.

Commercial brewery, Chiswick, London

At this point, beer brewing split into two separate strands. One
strand is the farmhouse brewing, which has continued up to the present
day in surprisingly many places. The other
strand is "normal" brewing, that is, all commercial brewing, as well
as modern homebrewing, which essentially is a scaled-down version of
the same tradition. The two did not remain 100% isolated, as borrowing
of techniques from commercial brewing into farmhouse brewing can be
seen in many instances, but the borrowing has been surprisingly
limited.

What today is called saison and biere de garde is basically
farmhouse brewing, as it existed in early 20th century Belgium and
France, commercialized and scaled up. The reason the two styles are so
hard to pin down is exactly because they are commercialized farmhouse
ale, and farmhouse ale is alien to the whole concept of style, and
wildly inconsistent from brewer to brewer. (I'll get back to why this
is in a later blog post.)

A key point in understanding farmhouse ale is that it's people
brewing for themselves, from their own ingredients, using the tools
and techniques they inherited from their ancestors. And since the
split-off point from commercial brewing lies so far back in time,
these beers are very, very different from the commercial ones.
Bizarre techniques like mashing for 24
hours, baking the malt into loaf shapes,
not boiling the wort,
reusing the same yeast for centuries,
mashing with hot stones until you boil away all the water, etc etc etc
seem so bizarre to people used to modern brewing because basically
they come from another, parallel world.

A world in which, it should be added, beer was brewed for entirely
different purposes. Brewing was commonly done for ritual occasions,
such as religious feasts or family events like birth, death, marriage,
etc. Some beer types were made for daily consumption, others for
special uses like harvest ale. Beer in the farmhouse context was a lot
more than just an alcoholic drink, in that it played a number of
deeply important roles in social and religious life. (I'll have to
expand on this, too, later on.) That aspect has typically changed in
most places over the previous century, but to some degree it does live
on in places.

Brewing on a farm, Tildonk, Belgium

So when people today take up brewing on a
farm but essentially take with them modern brewing techniques and
ingredients to that farm, that in my view is something completely
different from traditional farmhouse ale. Even if they do grow their
own ingredients. Note that it need not be bad, but it's a completely
different thing. It's not that the brewing takes place on a farm that
makes farmhouse ale farmhouse ale.

Walking into a brewery, you can see at a glance whether it's a
farmhouse brewery or a modern one. The brewing gear used is so
different that a single glance is literally enough. Reading about
farmhouse brewing techniques in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany,
Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, and Russia it's clear
that the farmhouse brewers in these places have a lot more in common
with each other than with commercial brewers. Just looking at
that video of
Russian farmhouse brewing you see that, yep, this is farmhouse
brewing.

Norwegian farmhouse brewing process (boiled version)

Above is a sketch of the basic Norwegian farmhouse brewing process
(and equipment). There's huge variation even within
Norway, but you can take this as a starting point for
understanding the processes. The container in step 3 is called "rost"
in Norway, "kuurna" in Finland, and "girine" in Lithuania. The details
of its construction and use vary from place to place, but once you
know the process, a glance at a photo of a Lithuanian farmhouse
brewery is enough to tell you which vessel is used in step 3.

Lithuanian farmhouse brewery (girine on far right)

It could be argued that, strictly speaking, saison and biere de
garde as you know them are not farmhouse ales. They are farmhouse ales
that have been imported into the world of commercial brewing,
undergoing some changes on the way. And we should all be glad that
this happened, because otherwise these styles would be totally unknown
to the beer world, which would then be a much poorer place.

And, one day, the same thing may happen to maltøl, sahti,
gotlandsdricka, and koduõlu, which would be a major enrichment
of world brewing culture. It already has happened to
kaimiškas, but
only in Lithuania, and since nobody goes to
Lithuania, nobody knows about it. Yet.

What a great read! I'm curious what you have to offer about traditional Latvian brewing, as that's where my wife's family is from and I'd love to attempt some classic techniques. Cheers!

Lars Marius - 2015-03-12 03:08:06

@Marshall: Thank you! Unfortunately, the Latvian tradition is the least-known of all of these. I've summarized what little I know here: http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/305.html I'm hoping to be able to travel there this summer and learn more. If I do I will definitely write about it.

A little bit more exists in written sources, but in German only, I'm afraid.

Wow, another wonderful post! I can't wait to hear more about the traditional brewing methods.

Ron Kaufmann - 2015-03-15 10:37:19

Lars, I like your take on farmhouse beer, especially from a European perspective. It's nice to know that traditional farmhouse brewing survives to this day, and is not constrained by certain styles. Here in the U.S. everything must be defined and fit into certain styles. Even so much so now that farmhouse beer and farm breweries have been classified as two distinctly separate entities that can exist without the other. See this article http://www.foodrepublic.com/2015/03/03/deciphering-craft-beer-terminology-farmhouse-vs-fa

Lars Marius - 2015-03-15 11:25:14

@Matt: Thank you. If you work backwards on the blog you'll find a good bit of documentation of brewing methods.

@Ron: That's the very article that provoked this blog post in the first place. :)